For five days of musical immersion in early June, the inaugural International Timpani Intensive (ITI) brought together timpanists from around the globe to Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music.
“In the symphony orchestra, the timpanist is separate from all the other percussionists,” said Shepherd School associate professor Matthew Strauss, who is also a co-founder and resident faculty artist at ITI as well as associate principal timpanist with the Houston Symphony. “It’s really important to have an intensive to be able to focus on it, because timpani is composed for almost every piece, whereas percussion is not in every piece.”
The faculty boasted prominent timpanists such as Leonardo Soto, Houston Symphony principal timpanist and ITI co-founder; Joseph Pereira, principal timpanist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic; Nick Woud, recently retired from the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam; and Jeff Luft, renowned timpani mallet maker.
“The nature of our seminar is the fact that there are so many different schools of thought of how this instrument is approached,” Soto said.
“The faculty are just some of the best timpanists in the entire world right now,” said freelance timpanist Stephanie Wilson, who traveled from North Carolina to attend ITI. “It’s a great opportunity to learn, to listen to their sounds and to glean any kind of knowledge from four of the best — and four very different players as well.”
ITI featured a comprehensive curriculum designed to advance the skills of participating timpanists. Activities included nine master classes presented by international faculty, private lessons and a mock audition. Notably, the winner of the mock audition earned a spot on the Houston Symphony sublist and a guaranteed performance with the orchestra.
“The attention to detail that these guys put in is amazing,” said Jakalin Bryant, a timpani student from Fort Valley, Georgia. “Even in life just in how you present yourself, how you play, it all corresponds with each other, and it’s just been the greatest learning experience.”
Inclusivity was a key theme of the ITI, with options for virtual attendance ensuring that dozens more timpanists worldwide could participate.
“The challenge with timpani specifically is that they’re extremely large, very heavy and they take up a lot of space,” said ITI co-founder Joshua Vonderheide. “There are people all over the world who just don’t have access to timpani. We want to make sure that everyone who wants the chance to learn how to play timpani should have access to the education at the highest level.”
For the 30 or so timpanists who were able to participate in person, the intensive fostered a sense of community, which is what Boston timpani student Eli Geruschat said drew him in the first place.
“I think the real thing I was chasing by coming to ITI was being around such a spectrum of phenomenal players who are both younger and older than me,” Geruschat said. “Varying approaches, different countries, origins, styles of playing, cultural backgrounds — I really wanted to come and kind of just see where I was fitting into all of that and what I could take and gain from all the colleagues here.”
“The shared passion between not only the faculty but also the other participants, it’s just amazing,” Wilson said when asked what she would take away from the experience. “There’s so much there that I think it’s going to take me a whole week to unpack it all.”
Feedback like that has all but solidified the event would return for a second year, organizers Soto, Vonderheide and Strauss said.
“It’s a great community of people, so we’re making lifelong friends, lifelong connections,” Strauss said.
To learn more about ITI, click here.